Personally I feel that Youtube is a great website for sharing videos. A factor that leads to the extreme popularity of youtube has got to be it’s free access to the many videos available in youtube. If Youtube were to charge a registration fee or membership fee, I am pretty sure that they will lose most of their users over midnight.
Another factor that might lead to the extreme popularity of youtube could be due to the variety of the videos that are available. From Movies to lectures, youtube is able to target people of all age group! Being able to do that, it will be weird if it is not popular among the people. I believe that anyone reading this blog would have viewed videos from youtube at least once.
As for the downsight of youtube, i believe that it would be the limit of the size of the video that can be uploaded. Competitors such as VEOH is catching up as their file size limit is relatively bigger than youtube. Like youtube, VEOH has a wide range of videos ranging from soap operas to music videos. With such strong competitors, Youtube has got to constantly come up with new ideas to attract its user.
The future directions for youtube? I believe that youtube might include social networking services in the future. With facebook up and rising, youtube and veoh will lack if they do not do something about this.
